NEO-INDIA
In November 2015 The Unstitute dug a tunnel from London, UK to Auroville, India - an experimental community dedicated to human consciousness. The following projects were created during our 5 months of exploration of the place and its people.
Video
MARCIN, THE WANDERER: After the monsoon rains broke we encountered Marcin, a nomad who had just returned to Auroville having travelled from Manali in the Himachal Pradesh. Marcin described to us the founding of Auroville in 1968; how Mirra Alfassa (known as The Mother) put her finger on a map of barren Union land where there existed nothing but a banyan tree, and from which her acolytes began to create the future city of Auroville, set within a hand-planted forest which now counts over one million mature trees. This experimental video was recorded on the afternoon we met, serving as our only memory of the Polish wanderer...
Sound
UNVIRONMENTS: a series of unique meditative environments created during The Unstitute's 5 months Residency at Auroville Radio
FERTILE: a unique sonic meditation environment, engineered from locally-sourced sound vibrations, and organically mastered at the secret jungle studio retreat of The Unstitute. Make a space for yourself, tune in and experience our 30 minute Yoga of Listening sessions of sound-field experiments to stir the tonalities of the soul.
WINDMILL: sonic meditation environment, influenced by local Aurovilian vibrations, and tweaked at the secret jungle studio retreat of The Unstitute. The derive begins at Fertile Windmill, travels through the wastes of abstract tonality, tinged by the bells of the Pongal cow.
TRANSITION: a session of experimental electronic meditation environments, generated and engineered inside Auroville for evolutionary purposes. Abstract tonalities and resonant filters make this a sound-field environment for evening meditation.
ARCADIA: a sonic exploration of meditative landscapes, this time invoking the legendary 'golden country' of Arcadia, ancient Greece, and latent parallels with the Aurovilian project. In Arcadia, The Unstitute became resonant chambers of mentation, projecting internal worlds onto external landscapes, and vice versa. The ‘ideal country’ of legend is only a tenuous, transient moment existing somewhere between the interplay of external vibration and internal frequency. The dissolution of the parameters of inner and outer, as the ego recognizes its own displacement into fiction, fear or fantasy, is the frequency which we have tried to bring you. This new type of semi-audible space, constructed from audible fractals and projections, echoes of selves creating selves, voices trapped in a chamber of perfect reverberation, evolving into Mandelbrotian sound hallucinations, shall be called an 'Egoscape'.
BREATH: this sound environment invokes an inner reality of breath as it unfolds in its rhythmic form and travels through vibrational chambers, echoing in the vast labyrinthine spaces created out layers of recordings of breath, voices and wind instruments.
PSYCHIC FIRE: taken from a recording of the dawn-fire at the amphitheatre on Auroville’s Birthday 2016, 'Psychic Fire' mines deeply the sound vibrations of the flame to release an inner complexity of harmony, dissonance, voices, shadows. The fire, which in its base perception is experienced as Fear, is transcribed into the meditative reality of divine anarchy, the primordial life-energy which is both the characteristic of Homo Sapiens (inquisitiveness/knowingness, burned on the Promethean fire of creative wisdom,) and of the evolution of consciousness, driving ever onwards towards states of greater cognitive complexity, towards the superhuman; the first rung on the ladder of conscious evolution. This is not music, but I feel it is not abstraction either. Hovering between the half-light of conscious and unconscious reality, just as we so often hover between superhuman and ape mentalities, the audio field I have tried to produce is a psychic fire for the mind.
Tropical Noir
Having left Auroville for Mammalapuram, The Unstitute became embroiled en-route in a murderous plot as yet to exist. The town was in thrall to an unseen depression brought about by the discovery of a body in the salt mines on the outskirts of town. This discovery had altered the typically benign social climate of the tourist town into one of brooding discontent, seeping from each street corner, pavement and rubbish-deposit. The Unstitute investigated the non-existent situation with unusual care...
